[Perspectives] Lady Mary Crawley, meet Dr Steven Corwin

May 23, 2015

The Lancet 385, 9982 (2015)

Author: Angus Deaton

What do Downton Abbey and the Metropolitan Opera have to do with New York-Presbyterian Hospital? More than you might think. In the USA, Downton Abbey is shown on television to an unprecedented number of viewers on the Public Broadcasting Service. Public television once eschewed commercials, but the recent broadcasts from New York prefaced Downton with a full minute advertisement about surgeries at the hospital. (The cancer was wrapped around my spine, but my docs aced it, and now I am the middleweight boxing champion of the world.) The back cover of the programme at the Metropolitan Opera features Gabby, diagnosed in childhood with tibial pseudarthrosis, whose leg would have been amputated by lesser docs, but now has braces only on her teeth.